Retrain Your Brain: 7 Steps From Outrage To Inner Peace

When unwelcome and alarming posts keep appearing on your feed, you can retune your algorithm. Here’s how to retrain your brain, too.

My last article, “How to Retune Your Algorithm for Spiritual Peace” offered six ways to retune the algorithm on your social media feed. But inner peace involves more than just changing your technology. Romans 12:2 says, “Do not be conformed to this age, but be transformed by the renewing of the mind.” Here’s how you can do that…

Re-Tuning the Algorithm in Your Brain

Just as there are ways to retune your social media feed, you can also retrain your brain toward inner peace instead of outrage. Here are some hacks to accentuate the positive and eliminate the negative in your world and the lives of others.

Control your inputs. Consider, like Carlos’s seven-week abstention from all screens or my forty-day fast from social media, controlling your digital diet. Unfollow outrage outlets. If watching or reading a particular source always makes you angry, stop doing that. Instead, limit your intake to sources that keep you informed while promoting your wisdom, beauty, humor, and peace.
Name it and claim it (of a different kind). When outrage hits you, pause and name it. Tell yourself, or a trusted person, “I’m feeling triggered by what I just read,” or “That’s outrage talking.” Take a break to practice box-breathing or some other relaxation technique that hacks your nervous system back into calm mode. Try standing up to stretch, going outside to walk in your bare feet, or touching something grounding. Claim the peace that you want to feel. It won’t happen unless you reach out and take it.
Train gratitude and wonder. If current events bother you, train yourself in gratitude by keeping a prayer journal for what’s in the news cycle. Make two columns: the left side is for the prayer request, and the right side is for recording when the answer comes. Seeing when and how your prayers are answered trains you to feel and express gratitude. Train yourself in wonder by making a conscious effort to notice something beautiful and inspiring each day. It may be a sunset, a flower, a child, or an act of compassion. Try memorizing Romans 12:9-21 so that you train yourself to bless, and not curse.
Reframe your story. You can shift from a feeling of dread to a sense of empowerment. Instead of, “the world is broken,” say, “I can contribute small acts of kindness and restoration.” When overwhelmed by the burden of the world’s great needs, ask yourself, “Is this mine to carry?” Or, at least, “Is this mine to carry alone?” Some outrages are for you to act on, and others are not. Knowing the difference preserves inner peace.
Build peaceful practices into your day. Try hot yoga or ice baths. Consider a daily devotion time or Tai Chi. Perhaps a morning ritual without screens—no phone for the first half hour of your day. Maybe take a phone-free lunch break. What about an evening wind-down? Swap doomscrolling for a calming habit like reading fiction, taking a bath, or stretching. By creating peaceful margins in your day, you leave room for the Holy Spirit.
Set boundaries when it comes to your news intake. After 9/11, I stopped watching TV news altogether. I can be just as informed by listening to reliable journalism on the radio or reading it from trusted sources, without seeing the images of death. It just wasn’t good for my mental health. You might set your own limits in terms of style of media intake as well as quantity. Try watching a half-hour news show each day, then turning it off. You don’t need to be a media glutton to stay informed.
Spread peace to others. If you see that something needs to change, don’t sit around and complain about it. You can be the one to spread peace, instead of waiting on others to do it. Mahatma Gandhi allegedly said, “Be the change you want to see in the world.” What he actually said is even better: “If we could change ourselves, the tendencies in the world would also change. As a man changes his own nature, so does the attitude of the world change towards him. … We need not wait to see what others do.” You can do this by modeling a calm presence online and not engaging in pointless arguments. When conversations get heated, practice radical listening—this lowers the temperature. This doesn’t mean that you should refrain from activism—Ghandi proved that the best form of protest is calm, loving, and kind. Do all you can to be a non-anxious presence in the lives of others. Your calmness can become contagious in groups. You don’t have to fix everything. Just be steady.

If you want to retrain your brain, you must learn to starve outrage by depriving it of the things that make it stronger. These seven steps help you retrain your brain away from outrage, and toward inner peace.

Change Your Thinking, Change the World

Some may mistake these words as a call to inaction, rather than a call to action in the face of injustice. On the contrary, this is a call to find inner peace from which to act.

We live in a world full of fear. Social media and biased news contribute to that. As the great sage Yoda said, “Fear is the path to the dark side. Fear leads to anger. Anger leads to hate. Hate leads to suffering (Star Wars: Episode I – The Phantom Menace).” We must act from a place of peace if we are to defeat the darkness.

By retuning your mental algorithm towards inner peace, you can act from a position of peacemaker. Jesus blessed the peacemakers, calling them children of God. If you want to be a peacemaker, you’ve got to change your thinking. Only then can you change the world.